!*&%~!

[magid]

Bike ride this morning. I was coming back on the bike path, and there's construction around Alewife, making the space for riding narrower. I was coming around a blind corner, carefully on the right, and a guy smashed right into me, head on (well, skew enough that our front wheels didn't hit, but you get the idea). He said something joking about knowing he was going to hit someone coming around the corner, and I pointed out that he should have been on the right. Of course, he was in a group of casual riders, who presumably wanted to chat, and therefore were paying no attention to this. He asked if I was ok, and I said my head and knee hurt. He said something about how at least I was wearing a helmet (he wasn't, but his head didn't get hit, because he was rather taller. Still, stupid of him.). One of the other people in the group said something about calling 911, and I moved my bike out of the way. When I looked around the corner again, they'd gone, and he hadn't given me any contact info at all. And of course, that was when I noticed that the right hood on the handlebars was bent inward*. Nothing to do but bike home (noticing that the gears were not stable :-( ), wishing I had someone to give me a hug. I'm a bit wobbly emotionally; though I might get a bit of a lump on my forehead over my right eye later, that seems to be the extent of the body stuff.

eta,23:48 Unnoticed until about an hour ago: a nice lump on my right forearm, on the top/outside. Not really painful (the forehead one is, still), which is why I managed to miss it until now.


* I'd done this same thing to the bike three weeks after I'd bought it, but paying for my own stupidity doesn't bother me nearly as much as paying for someone else's.